A few more recent things

Okay, a few more recent things:

Ian Bogost and I have been developing a very exciting new series of books and essays called Object Lessons. Ian made a lovely teaser poster for the series. The full site with information for submitting proposals will be live, with any luck, by early June. 

Over the past couple months I've written three brief book reviews for the New Orleans Review, where I'm the new book review editor. One is a review of a favorite (and out of print) book I read as a kid; another is of a thoroughly enjoyable place-based exploration of New York by Justin Nobel; and the third is of a newly published transcript of a fascinating interview with Michel Foucault conducted in 1968. Have you read something recently that you'd like to write about? Or is there something new coming out that you'd like to read with an eye to review? I'm happy to consider all sorts of reviews of new and revisited books, either in short form or essay format.

I wrote a very short piece for The Rumpus "readers report back" column—scroll down to the fifth entry to see mine. This piece is sad and serious, playful yet loaded with bigger questions that I'm puzzling over in other contexts.

I'm up in Michigan now, working on my writing projects while also getting out into the woods and taking walks on the shoreline. Here's the satellite view of where I am: 

Recent Things

It has been a very busy spring, with perhaps one too many trips to the airport, even for me. My son, not yet three, can now effortlessly identify the corporate logo of Southwest (those cheery wings with a heart in the middle), delineate the various stages of pre-boarding, and nap in-flight like a champ. I had not planned for him to become such a savvy frequent flyer, at least not by this age.

Yesterday I was telling one of my students to make sure he keeps his online project fresh with recent things, even if they are mere notes jotted down, images collected, citations, or ideas for future writing projects.

I realized during the conversation that I need to take my own advice. So here are some recent things:

Nathan Martin over at Room 220 wrote a flattering and spot-on review of my airport book.

I talked about this review, among other things, on a guest post at the Bloomsbury Literary Studies blog.

I continue to work on my Brad Pitt book, which has taken some weird new turns that I'm excited about. Remember Pitt's fleeting cameo in Being John Malkovich? Well, it got me thinking...

I'm also starting to sketch out (at least in my head) my book about northern Michigan. This past week I presented my brief autobiography to the Environment Program at Loyola, and this informal presentation helped me focus some of the interests and concerns that I hope to address in that book.

Speaking of environment, I've been gradually writing my paper for ASLE (the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment), which I'll be presenting in May in Lawrence, Kansas. My paper is on weather at airports, or how airports actually maintain or even create certain concepts of weather.

Most recently I've been working on a brief essay on jet bridges, those transitional objects that we pass through on the way to flight—common, bland, and relatively invisible. Or, as they announce of themselves, "uneven surfaces." The essay should be out soon, and it is part of a much larger project, one that I'll talk more about next time.

Field Notes From the End of a Blog

When Ian Bogost was in town last November, we talked about the strange status of blogs in the expanding arena of online publishing and twitter. So I was glad to see that he recently blogged about it, in a suitably brief fashion. I agree with Ian entirely: it's not clear to me what a blog is for any more, or how to write on (or in?) one.

It even feels weird to have this massive white open screen that I'm typing in right now, and to just be writing words and sentences like this with no limit imposed.

This weird feeling is no doubt partly caused by how much I use my twitter feed these days—which isn't really that much compared to a lot of people on twitter.

But twitter infects your thought and writing process. And I think it's mostly a good kind of infection, a productive repurposing of writerly rumination and expression.

Yet it's bizarre to feel a whole platform—this blog space that for a few years felt really comfortable and useful—become an uncomfortable, undesirable, even retrograde seeming place. To feel a medium lose its vibrancy right before your eyes...

Welcome Aboard, Mind the Battery

My essay on the Boeing Dreamliner has been published over at The New Inquiry. 

 

I set out to write about the Dreamliner because I was intrigued by its innovative features and near utopian promises, details and visions hailed as the airliner merged into general commercial service around the globe. On one of their dreamy spreads for the new plane, Boeing marketed it as such:

Imagine inspiring views wherever you sit. Imagine arriving refreshed, with new technologies that actually invigorate. Imagine a plane with a smoother ride, where bumps are softened so you can rest easy. We did. And then we built one. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner. It's more than a dream. It's Boeing. Welcome Aboard.

If the airliner's reception was lukewarm (and in some cases probably not even noticed), this just made the case more interesting. As I was connecting through Houston earlier this month, I raced around the clamorous concourses in an attempt to see a United Dreamliner that was preparing to depart. When I got to the gate and stared out the window at the new plane, I was both captivated and a little let down: it's just another plane, another flight, ground-crew rearranging the baggage carts and cones, preparing for the next arrival. The Dreamliner's engines revved a vaguely alien hum as it prepared to roll toward the taxiway. 

When I first began to write about the Dreamliner, I thought I'd take a round-trip flight on the new plane and write about it while flying and between the flights. (I might still do that at some point, for a different kind of essay.) But then I started to read about about the reactions of people who had now flown on the plane (e.g., "Oh my God, the toilet is amazing!"..."The windows are a tiny bit bigger!"), and I started to think that another way to approach the object of the airliner would be from a discursive distance, as it were—as a new piece of technology provoking surprisingly underwhelming reactions & responses, attitudes and affects that reflect the current comportments of air travel. 

Then as I combed through the various reports and accounts of the new airliner, and as as I ruminated on the rather flaccid romance of commercial air travel as it has come to emerge in 2012, I found myself looking back at earlier airliners—two in particular developed in the 1960s, the DC-9 and the Boeing 737, two planes with very different lives and fates. Thinking about these planes, constellated historically and contemporaneously in relation to the Dreamliner, gave the essay a new shape and trajectory. 

As the Dreamliner experienced electrical fires and was eventually grounded around the world, the essay took on yet another dimension, one having to do with the lithium-ion batteries that nestle in our pockets and threaten the new airliners. It's curious that we can cognitively separate a battery from an airplane, but to isolate a mere wing or window as problematic would seem nonsensical: it's the plane, stupid.

For now the Dreamliner remains grounded, its future uncertain. This is a good time to think about the airliner, while we can't yet fly on it.

New Book Cover

I'm really pleased to show off the slightly modified cover for the paperback edition of my book, which will be out in a month or so!

The book has been re-branded by Bloomsbury, at I'm very happy with how they tweaked the cover for their imprint. (It's the little things.) And on the back, books-within-books, mise en abyme for curious readers...

And if your library has access to Oxford journals, you can access a new book review of The Textual Life of Airports forthcoming in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature & Environment.  I was very glad to see this review, as it acknowledges one of the trickiest and most subtle aspects of my project, namely how I am trying to understand the environmental qualities of airports.

Two Ways of looking at Emergency Slides

This gem just arrived in the mail:

An Air France A380 emergency briefing card, and some airport haiku, from my awesome & inspiring architect cousin, Emily White!

One haiku reads:

Passenger parade

Mysterious upper deck

Who is sitting there?

In other news, a 787 Dreamliner made an emergency landing at Takamatsu airport in Japan after an apparent electrical fire, and the slides were deployed:

To modify slightly the words of Jacques Derrida: the airliner is the site of a great affair, truly. For me, the airliner is a church in which secret rendez-vous are given. When I seen an airliner with emergency slides popped I tremble as if in a sacred place, full of refused, promised, threatening pleasures.

Deconstructing Brad Pitt cover concepts

Look at these lovely cover concepts for the Brad Pitt book!

These concepts are by the brilliant Nancy Bernardo, who also designed the award winning cover of the now rare Checking In / Checking Out.

My partner remarked on the 'architectural' feel of these covers, and this is exactly one of the valences that the title term 'deconstructing' is meant to play off of.

Seeing these covers makes me eager to dive back into the book and finish it.  I'm in the process of editing the chapters, which come from a range of scholars and fields; and then this summer I've got to buckle down and write my own chapter & an introduction to the book.  I'd also like to include an interview with Mr. Pitt himself; we'll see if I can swing that.

As the book comes together over this spring and into the summer, I'll post more about it here.

Writing about the Dreamliner

I'm writing about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

I'm thinking about this aircraft's composite promises and early reception.  I'm thinking about its innovations as well as its expected reiterations.  Its electrical shorts and its ultra-sleek toilet, its LED ambient interior lighting and its windows that are a little bit bigger than other commercial airliners' windows.

The Dreamliner (what a name!) has been called "a plane of the future," but it looks surprisingly familiar.  In this world, at this stage of species-being, what hopes and realities do we find in a new aircraft and its attendant aura?

Critical Air Studies

Two Flights

This is one of the exciting things I've been working on: I'm now accepting submissions for a special issue of Criticism shaped around the topic 'Critical Air Studies'. 

From the poetics of airborne perspectives to the halting grind of airport delays; from the politics of full body scanners to pressures on labor unions and massive corporate mergers; from narratives about contemporary globalization to the early instrumentalities of Empire; from serving as staging grounds for ecological crisis to acting as reserves for certain performances of gender & sexuality; from the secret machinations of drone warfare to the banalities of in-flight WiFi—air travel finds itself at the nexus of myriad popular conversations and charged discourses.  

Two Jet Streams

This special issue of Criticism will explore the cultural forms and philosophical implications of human flight, spanning from early modernist representations to the most current developments and heated debates. The articles in this issue of Criticism will bring timely critical perspectives to bear on ideological, theoretical, and aesthetic matters of air travel.  

Two Ospreys

The issue will feature six full-length articles, as well as a cluster of book review essays that engage recent work on global tourism, pre-histories of air travel, airport aesthetics, the labor of flight, aircraft design, aero-militarism, and other matters of transport. 

Proposals by 1 July 2013; final submissions will be due 1 December 2013. To submit a proposal, book review idea, or full article, contact me at schaberg@loyno.edu

Two Air Force Ones

Environmentality & the Visual Culture of Plane Crashes

"Project Mayhem" briefing card from the film Fight Club (20th-c Fox, David Fincher, 1999)

This post is a sneak peek of part of an essay of mine that is being published in a book called Beauty, Violence, Representation (as part of the Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies series). My chapter adapts Arun Agrawal’s term "environmentality" to think about how air travel disasters are represented and mediated in contemporary U.S. culture.

Agrawal uses the term environmentality to describe how people become political subjects through the creation and dissemination of environmental policies and ecological knowledge.  Agrawal demonstrates how, as land and resources become objects of statistics, ordered consumption, and conservation, environmentality emerges through people becoming certain kinds of subjects: environmental subjects.  This is not necessarily a specific way of inhabiting or treating an environment, but rather accounts for how people gradually become implicated in and subject to specific cultural and political designations about what an environment is in the first place. 

A couple pages into my essay, I discuss a visual text from the everyday culture of flight that helps illuminate how I employ this critical term. Environmentality in the sense I am using it is apparent on safety briefing cards in commercial airliners, where the inside technologies and outside ecosystems are juxtaposed stark form.

Segment of a safety briefing card from an Alaska Airlines MD80, circa 2003

On this Alaska Airlines briefing card, an idyllic alpine scene is depicted outside of the crash-landed aircraft. Let us suspend disbelief for a moment concerning the implausibly intact landing gear or the slim chances of such a graceful emergency landing in rugged terrain. Let us focus, instead, on the outside environment that appears in this info-graphic. Upon first glance, the scene simply suggests an open space that one can dash into after an emergency landing. 

And yet, as we consider further the informational incongruities located in these processual frames, the contrasting images become more curious. The technical diagrams detail various contingency escapes from the aircraft, including materially specific directions about how to deploy the tail slide, for instance. These diagrams are somewhat offset by boldly rendered (if technically unnecessary) landscape features, such as fecund foothills and sublime mountains jutting up on the horizon. What is the function of this highly aestheticized outside? My theory, as evinced in this example, is that there is a critical relationship between ideas of environment and technicalities of air travel disasters.

Lingering on this emergency briefing card, we can see how the potentially harrowing event is tied to an environmental-aesthetic register: the sky is intensely blue, and the dramatic snow-peaked mountains give way to verdant forests—it is an encompassing ecosystem rendered in miniature. The beauty and eco-logic of a world beyond thus somehow buttresses the violence of the plane crash. Outside the wrecked airplane and its tight seating configurations, one finds oneself in an ecological tabula rasa, a space open to inhabitation and free mobility. 

The shattered dream of the passenger traveling by air ends up on the ground, and the violence of the crash becomes a portal into a pristine, beautiful wilderness. The air travel disaster becomes a zero point for a survivalist fantasy, a reset button that places the human subject back in a pure state of nature, like Robinson Crusoe on his island. In other words, the techno-culture of modern air travel is subtended by a mindset of naturalism, and by an idea of beautiful wilderness as an always-available foundation point where human progress can begin afresh. 

--

Here are the rest of the images that the essay refers to:

Slideshow on USAToday.com October 1, 2012

Continental Flight 1404 as shown on DenverPost.com

Continental Flight 1404 aerial view, as seen in The New York Times online

Mike Wilson’s photograph of Continental Flight 1404 on TwitPic

Screenshot of Double Bird Strike!!! in The New York Times online

Screenshot of “The Last Minutes of Flight 3407” interactive graphic in The New York Times online

Screenshot of “Flight Path Simulation” for Continental 3407 in The New York Times online

In the Thick of It, Visualizing My Writing Cabin

Last month I read D.T. Max's biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, and my review of the book appears on the recently revamped site of the New Orleans Review.

I enjoy writing book reviews; they are exercises in brevity, while also allowing one to make swift connections across fields and topics that may seem otherwise unrelated. Book reviews are like a way to cover a bunch of topics that are on your mind, funneling them all through a single title. One of my excellent students is working on his first book review right now (of Krista Comer's super sharp Surfer Girls in the New World Order), and I'm looking forward to helping him craft the review to submit to a hip new journal that is open to good writing from across the spectrum of disciplinary expertise and professional status.

Besides that book review and some experimental work on my sequel airport book, I haven't been writing too much myself, these days; I've been swamped with editing projects, committee work on my campus, and reading through the 200 applications for a single tenure-track position we're searching for in my department. The latter is particularly intense work: you get to see all the brilliant research scholars are doing in a certain field, but you also face the sad state of affairs in our culture, where we are producing multitudes of eager and ready professors for a scant number of actual secure teaching jobs. Let's hope that the academic job market is on an upswing, because there are so many fantastic people who deserve to get good jobs where they can do their research and teach people how to read, think, write, and imagine. I had the thought the other day as I was going through applications that we should convert retired aircraft carriers into free, floating universities where professors in transition could teach their dream classes for a year or two while on the job market.  I haven't figured out the details; I'm just planting a utopian seed.

When I'm in the thick of back-to-back-to-back committee meetings, when I'm in the trenches of grading essays, when I'm reading smart applications for dozens of people we just can't hire, when I'm conjuring up new course ideas and creative assignments, when I'm editing other people's writing and trying to mentally coordinate the overall shape of a book with individual chapters, sections, paragraphs, and sentences—in short, when I get really busy and bogged down in my academic work, I love to be reminded of my writing cabin in northern Michigan, where I go each summer to work, read, play, and plan the next school year. (This is where I first read all of David Foster Wallace, in anticipation of the seminar I taught on his work last year—and which I plan to teach again next year.)

True, it's not really 'my' cabin, and it isn't strictly a 'writing' cabin (we live in it, too, during the summer months)—nevertheless I like to think of it as my writing cabin, and visualizing it helps me get through the times when my hands feel dirty and stuck in the fecund muck that is day-to-day academic life. It is a good life, no doubt, and I really have nothing to complain about. But the truth is that academic life, which sounds like a breeze from outside (You get summers off! You teach just a few days a week!), is actually a totally permeating and immersive experience. As it should be, I suppose.

The Problem

The problem with blogs is that you feel like you've got to keep them updated somewhat regularly—at least that's how I feel. I've always tried to keep a flexibly disciplined schedule when it comes to posting on my blog: I aim for two times a month, roughly. Any more and I start to get frantic. Any less and I feel like the blog turns into an archaeological dig.

Sometimes I get excited about various things and I write more than two posts. Other times, a month goes by and all I've had time for / been inspired to write is one meager post. Occasionally I really have to force it. That's never good, but it keeps the blog 'fresh' or at least appearing somewhat such.

And yet then there's always the curious performative aspect of writing: once you've put something into words, it's weirdly made real, or at least subject to a certain realist impulse. This is something I've been thinking about and reading about, and that has been distracting me from writing on my blog. Actually I've been tweeting about it a little, in very roundabout ways, thus further taking me away from the blog (as well as away from other things).

The last few weeks have involved some combination of the reasons for not writing a post. I've been busy working on other stuff, and therefore my creative energy has been drawn away from bi-weekly blog posts. I could describe some of the things that have been occupying my time (a couple of them are really thrilling, and a few others involve the sort of tedium that will crush the strongest of souls), but then I'd be using time writing a blog post about those things rather than working on them, and there's lots of work to be done on them, both the thrilling kind and the soul-crushing kind.

I should probably stop this blog post short here, before it forms into a full-blown vortex of solipsism and self-referential tunneling. Writing in our age of new media can be a bewildering experience.

Morning Walk Photo Essay II

It was about a year ago that I posted my first morning walk photo essay; I figured today that it was time to post a second one.  (I find myself telling students that things become so much more interesting when you do them multiple times—like reading, writing, etc.)  So here we go.

Loading up the stroller outside our house, I take a moment to capture the houses on our block.  I never tire of the block-by-block topography of New Orleans shotguns houses.  The colors and the decorative details, the rickety windows and crumpling stoops, the ferns punching out of the old brick piers, the geckos incognito or skittering across the sideboards...okay, my passenger Julien is eager to get going.

On our way, a few doors down the block we get to the house that has been raised entirely and beneath which a first floor is being constructed:

With property values increasing steadily in Uptown, I guess it makes sense to double the square-footage of the home while minimizing the construction and materials involved.  We were gone this summer when they lifted the house, but I wish I could have observed the effort that went into it.

Next we encounter a very pregnant mama cat who lounges and watches us with big yellow eyes.  I want one of the kittens.

On every block we see tremendous piles of debris leftover from the hurricane.

The sheer density and diversity of these piles is hard to capture with the iPhone camera: masses of organic matter the most obvious, but also telephone lines, plastic baggies that say THANK YOU with dog shit inside, putrid rodent carcasses, soggy mattresses, towels, and rugs, bird feathers....  Here's another pile a bit farther along the walk; look how the huge black garbage bags are dwarfed by the palm fronds and the banana tree stalks:

And one more for good measure:

By the way, this isn't just a banal account of my morning walk (but it is that, too).  In the "Literature & Environment" course I'm planning, I'm going to have my students compose walking photo essays, and so I'm actually thinking about the parameters and possibilities for such an assignment as I write this.  I want to teach my students how, in the spirit of Tim Morton's book The Ecological Thought, environment is "stunningly vast and disturbingly decentered."  Maybe this walk seems pretty small-scale and centered, but I think the point is to ratchet up the perception and awareness to the point where the seemingly ordinary becomes overbrimming with uncanniness, expansiveness, and ontological richness.

Take, for instance, the telephone pole that we walked under a few blocks later. This thing was making sounds that resembled a barely legible song or an alien language that compelled us to pause beneath it and listen as it chattered and bleeped, as if announcing its presence.

Onward then, toward the river.  Things always get weird when we get close to the river.  An omen of this is an espresso machine that somebody jettisoned onto the curb.  I almost want to take it, but I don't.  There's something daunting about it.

When we get to the river we hear a whir of machinery and the scrapes and clunks of forklifts moving pallets of stuff around.  There's a new food packing (I think?) facility that has twenty-some loading docks for semi trucks, as well as its own feeder railroad track where they are loading a line of refrigerated boxcars.  Two of the cars have faces painted on them, a motif that fascinates me—animated and leering cargo.

Now at the river, as we amble along the boardwalk I spot something in the water: a fin, and a tail—an enormous fish cruising right at the surface of the water.  It must be four feet long, at least.  I can't get close too it, so I try to zoom-in with my camera, but it gets pixelated.  Still, you can see it out just above and to the right of the center of the frame, leaving a slight disturbance in the current behind it:

This thing is huge, and I watch it for a while.  I'm tempted to trudge down the riprap and wade into the water to get closer to it, maybe even grab it—but Julien is getting restless, ready to get out of the stroller and do his own adventuring.  

So we move along, and soon we find another feline surprise: two of the wild cats that live in the riprap. There are dozens of these scrawny but beautifully shaped cats living in the ecotone between the river and the park.  They slink among the willows and the Chinese tallow trees, and usually dart off before you can get a good look at them.  But one of them, a young small black one, turned and looked at us, and I managed to snap a picture of it before it bolted into the vines and out of sight.  

We turn away from the river and head back toward Magazine Street, pausing when we get to the big live oaks in front of Audubon zoo, where Julien likes to play.  After a summer in northern Michigan foraging and playing the woods and meadows, Julien now looks for the pockets of wild vegetation around the urban landscape—and once he finds a good spot, he'll spend thirty minutes or so collecting, breaking, making, and jabbering to the branches, acorns, moss, and leaves.

Then we head home.

And there you have it.  A 90-minute walk, documented by fifteen photos and brief commentary (just under 1000 words).  This is a working template for an assignment in contemporary literature & environment.  I'm assembling a funky and unexpected reading list for this course (mixed in with some classics), and I'm excited to see what my students make of it.

Getting Back to Things

We made it home after a long drive back, full of anticipation and uncertainty, wondering how our home had weathered the storm and hoping everything was (at least mostly) all right.  The last hour of the drive was stunningly beautiful, cruising over the bloated wetlands as the clouds built and tumbled in the distance.  Beautiful, of course, with a post-sublime sort of caveat.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how the smells of New Orleans seep up from the ground.  I've experienced this in a whole new way on returning, after hurricane Isaac slowly organized, sat and spun for a while over the city, and finally blew through.

The garbage around town wasn't picked up for days, in some cases a week, and to walk the blocks now is to rather swim through pungent scent clouds of slimy plastic wrappers; collapsed cardboard boxes; dead rats and mice that crawled into the garbage cans and could not get back out; stale beer, orange juice, milk; rotting paper diapers; decaying chicken and ham bones and ribs and shrimp heads; moldy bread; waterlogged plywood; dead leaves...to name a mere few of the recognizable objects festering on the street post-hurricane.

Driving back into town I was struck by the bent road signs, ripped up billboards, and piles of debris in the neutral ground.  The lights at intersections were either blinking red and yellow, or altogether dark—cars chaotically stopping and going, traffic somehow moving along.  People ambled down the streets in what looked like a semi-daze.  Utility trucks could be seen in every direction, cherry pickers raised and men with fire-proof gauntlets hard at work, in the balmy afternoon temperature of 95 degrees.

Our small house made it through okay, no major damage on the outside.  An old crape myrtle tree in front of our home was snapped off at the base of its trunk, and is now lying in the street right where our car would have been parked had we stayed.  And part of our front room ceiling is ballooning with old rainwater, cracking in some places.

I had left a plastic bucket beneath this spot before we left town (it dripped a little during the last tropical storm a couple years ago), and I'm glad I did: there were about four gallons of yellowish water in it when we got back.  The house has a peculiar smell now, wafting down from the cracks in the ceiling; I need to crawl up to that point in our attic to check it out, but I'm procrastinating—it's not going to be pretty.  I know we'll probably have to have significant work done on that part of the roof, termites are attracted to it, etc.—but we want to put a metal roof on the whole house, which is going to be a major endeavor, so I'm delaying for now.

And anyway I'm busy getting back to things, trying to reclaim something like everyday life.

The semester began, just a week late and with everyone slightly frazzled.  My class this semester seems full of bright and excited students.  This will be the fourth time I've taught the class called "Texts & Theory" at Loyola, and I like it more each time I teach it.  It's basically an introduction to literary criticism, but it's also a class that expands and explodes what we mean by text, and shows how theory sometimes weirdly means practice.  I tell my students that our goal is to get really confused by texts and theory—and then to articulate and explain this confusion as clearly as possible.  I've never really taught the class the same way twice; I design it with enough wiggle room that it allows us to toggle between literature, culture, and philosophy—as well as linger on surprise topics and go down unexpected paths.

This year we started with some Lydia Davis and the first two pages of Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, all by way of easing into discussions of what the heck 'literary theory' might be.  We're going to work our way toward Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing which we'll finish the class with, corresponding with a visit from Ian.  I'm conjuring an unusual final project for this course; it's going to involve something that the students 'make', or some kind of 'paper' that might not look paperish at all on first glance.  We'll see.

In other mundane news, I was very happy to see my essay "Flying Objects, Sitting Still, Killing Time" published in the journal Transformations; it's about the shared sensations of airport seating and airplane seats.  I started working on this topic back at Davis in 2006, presented it at ACLA a couple years ago, and it took on several different forms before finding a place in this issue dedicated to "hyperaesthetic culture."  I'm grateful for the astute suggestions from the blind reviewers who read my essay—they helped it become a piece I'm really proud of, an essay that draws from my airport book while also moving in new directions.  This photograph taken by my old friend Ryan Williams sort of sums up the topic of the essay:

Another offshoot of my continued interest in air travel, I thoroughly enjoyed reading and reviewing Peter Adey's excellent Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects—a book which will bend your mind and reorient your sense of the history of flight. My review will appear in the inaugural issue of the journal Interstitial, whose advisory board I'm honored to be on.

My current book project Deconstructing Brad Pitt is gradually coming together; I've got a range of fascinating chapters from an eclectic array of scholars, and I plan to work my way through each piece over the course of this fall.  At some point in the near future I'll post the working table of contents.  I'm eager to meet with my editor at Continuum and talk about the cover design of the book.  (The cover on the righthand side of this blog is just a stand-in that I whipped up.)

I also started another book this summer, which I'm tentatively calling Notes from the Sleeping Bear.  It's going to be a book about ecological thinking, written from (and largely about) the area where I spend every summer, the Leelanau peninsula of Michigan.  I'm conceiving of it as a 21st-century Walden, of sorts.  I realize that sounds grandiose, but Thoreau's book is grandiose—and yet so aware of its grandiosity, at the same time.

That's my fall update.  I've got a couple other projects in the works, and some new courses I'm planning—but I'll stop rambling on, for now.  There's still some cleaning up to do around here.

Notes on Evacuating

Last night at this time I was building a model of our home out of Legos, showing my two-year-old roommate Julien how we had prepared for the storm: how we had boarded up the vulnerable back window, and how the wind would slam into the house and whip around the next-door palm tree when the hurricane hit. We played out various scenarios, and Julien would grunt his affirmative "Hm!" with each demonstration.

Overnight the winds picked up, rattling our old windows, and the air started to change.  At three in the morning I got up and packed the car; at 4:00 we drove off, Julien still slumbering in the back seat.  We didn't necessarily know anything more about the storm at that point—it was still "trying to become better organized"—but it was time for us to go.  

The roads were empty as we drove out of the city on US-10.  As we merged onto the highway we saw the first droplets rain on the windshield.

You could practically feel the heavy penumbra of sherbet spreading over the city—and what a strange feeling to be speeding way from it, sitting in a reclined chair in a somewhat aerodynamic 2700-lb metal box on wheels. During those predawn hours I kept looking back in the rearview mirror at the glowing cloud mass.  How big was it?  Was it building?  How bad would it get?  What about our house?  Had we made the right choice?  Should we be there with our friends who had stayed?  All these questions and more were at turns enhanced and subsumed by the necessary myopia that is driving.

Later in the morning as we zoomed up I-55 we saw shattered turtle shells from ruined would-be highway crossers, and shredded armadillos balled up on the side of the road.  And of course, there were the ubiquitous black forms of ejected truck tire husks, sometimes dangerously curling up in and between the lanes.  There's something singularly terrifying about watching a big-rig shed a tire in real time, everyone speeding along merrily at 80 miles per hour while a certain tire that only you can see starts to buckle, flap on its wheel, and begin to disintegrate, leaving its carnage to flip and tumble behind, for other cars to veer around or run over.

Then there were billboards advertising hamburger choices, and others lambasting the choice to have an abortion—and still more billboards selling billboard space, a veritable landscape of meta-advertising.

We'll spend a few days in St. Louis, where Julien is getting some unexpected quality time with his grandparents.  It's good to see him running around the yard and making up games in this new place.

But I miss our home. In my mind I keep trying to inhabit it—to check a certain leak in the ceiling, to mop up the drips around the fireplace, or to stand over that one crack in the floorboards where the wind always whistles in underfoot. I find myself imagining what the house is feeling as the storm moves through.  The house is old, and this is one of many many storms it has been through—it probably has its own patterns and flexions for dealing with such torrents of wind and rain.  The power appears to be off in our neighborhood now, and I imagine the whine of generators interspersed with the gusts and the downpour.

On our way north on I-55, we passed several dozen energy company bucket trucks that were headed south, driving in teams, toward the Gulf Coast. Help on its way.

We'll be back in New Orleans soon, back in our home.

Waiting for a storm

Right now we're just waiting for a storm, to see what it will do.  It's eerie.  There's the god's eye view provided by satellites, but this form of 'knowledge' is hardly commensurate with life on the ground.

The planes overhead seem louder than normal, today; maybe one of them is a NOAA Hurricane Hunter.

I can't decide if that name—Hurricane Hunter—is comical or heroic, an absurd misnomer or an admirable attempt at something more primitive within our techno-media maelstrom.

Beyond the planes and helicopters chopping above, there's a different kind of buzz outside: the buzz of people stocking up at our neighborhood market, and other people frantically loading their cars in order to evacuate.  Some cars drive down our skinny street startlingly fast—panic in action.  Other people gab and laugh and stroll down the street with cases of Abita and Miller High Life on their shoulders.  We've got our bags packed and the house all tied down—but we're not leaving, at least not yet.

This morning it was dead-still, and the sky was a brilliant azure —I've never quite appreciated the phrase "calm before the storm" until today.  Now, at 3:30, the light in the sky is diffuse in a weird way. There isn't exactly a cloud layer yet, but it's as if a sheet of fine linen has been pulled over us.  The wind is starting to gust, and I can hear it sporadically whistling through the 100-year-old chimney a few feet away from me as I write this.